Interconnections of different network devices (e.g., Hosts, Servers,) in large data centers require careful handling of unicast and multicast forwarding tables to avoid unmanageable table sizes as the data center scales upward in size. These forwarding tables are required to maintain lists of which devices are attached to which ports so that network traffic can be delivered across those ports associated with the traffic's multicast or unicast destination address. Under the Transparent Interconnect of Lots of Links (TRILL) standard, TRILL switches (also called routing bridges or RBridges) maintain a link state protocol amongst themselves in which connectivity is broadcast to all of the RBridges allowing each RBridge to know about all the other RBridges and the connectivity between them. This gives the RBridges enough information to compute pair-wise optimal paths for unicast traffic, and to calculate distribution trees for delivery of traffic either to destinations whose location is unknown or to multicast/broadcast groups. Conventional approaches attempt to address the table size management problem by assigning ‘nicknames’ to different areas of the network. At the borders between areas, the nicknames of local RBridges are translated to an assigned switch nickname of the area and vice versa. Under the TRILL standard, however, multicast data is forwarded along a logical tree that spans across all participating RBridges, creating a number of border crossings that result in an unfavorable performance degradation as the nickname translations are performed.